Midterm #1 Flashcards
How did Peter Hunt describe children’s lit?
- Children’s lit is often regarded as an oxymoron
- Child= immaturity
- Literature=sophistication
Gubar: Why is “literature read by young people” too broad of a definition?
Gubar states that “literature read by young people” is too broad because it could mean any text read by children- including porn and romance
Gubar: Why is “literature published for young people” not a good definition?
- What about texts that appeared before 18th C booksellers such as fairy tales, myths and chapbooks?
- Children lit is relatively new and has always attracted a variety of readers
Gubar: Why is “literature addressed to children by authors who conceptualize young people as a distinct audience” not a good definition?
Because authors reject the idea that they are writing for a specific age group
Publishers/readers define their books as YA
ex: Crossover titles such as Harry Potter
Significance of McDowell: (Fiction for Children and Adults: Some Essential Differences)
Definer or Anti-Definer?
McDowell: “Definer”- believed that:
- Children think quantitatively different than adults
- Children are more active than ruminant
- Children’s lit is simple and formulaic and full of action not description or introspection
Significance of Perry Nodelman: (The Hidden Adult)
Definer or Anti-Definer?
Nodelman: “Definer” believed that:
- Children’s lit is simpler and less complete than adult literature
- Plots do not diverge greatly from the same basic story pattern
- Child readers are imagined by a series of adults
- The adult is central to literature: the adults who imagine and produce the literature, the adults who purchase
Problems with “The Hidden Adult” argument
Assumes that all children’s lit is written by adults
-what about oral storytelling, child authors, fan fiction
Significance of John Rowe Townsend
Definer or Anti-Definer?
Gubar: “Anti-Definer”
Wrote “standard criticism for Childrens Lit”
He argues that it is wrong to suggest that children possess a body of text as they are all written, published, reviewed and often read by adults- completely adult controlled
-Children are not a separate form of life from adults
Significance of Jack Zipes
Definer or Anti-Definer?
Gubar: “Anti-Definer”
-He argued that there is no such thing as children lit- there has never been a literature conceived for children by children and never will be
Significance of Jacqueline Rose
Definer or Anti-Definer?
Gubar: “Anti-Definer”
Wrote “The Case of Peter Pan-The Impossibility of Children’s Lit”
-Children’s lit is impossible- it is not about real children rather adult anxieties and fantasies about children and childhood
There is no child
Mariah Gubars Main Argument- The “Not Definer”
- The problem with the definer and antidefniner is that they cut young people out of the picture entirely
- We can give up on the unenlightening task of generating a definition without giving up on the idea that children lit is a viable category
- Use “piecemeal”- focus out attention in different subareas and acknowledge messiness and diversity
What example does Gubar use to reinforce her “Not Definer” Argument ?
- Gubar draws on Wittgenstein and the example of “games”
- Board games and olympic games have nothing in common rather a complicated network of similarities and relationships
Main Argument of “No More Adventures in Wonderland”
Tatar-argues that past children’s lit evil characters contain horror but the juvenile aspects combat this horror
- However childrens lit today presents a lot of dark materials and a large dose of adult reality
- Reminisces on the “golden age of childhood”
The concept of childhood as we understand it began developing when? Why?
The concept of childhood as we understand it today didn’t really begin developing until the seventeenth century
-Child/ infant mortality was extremely high
How is the notion of childhood a social construction?
The notion of childhood is a social construction because we understand it through a mediation of social, cultural and political forces
When did children’s lit become a phenomenon?
Children’s lit is a recent phenomenon- roots in the 18th C
Children’s Lit in the Classical Period (500 BCE- 400 CE)
- There was no distinguishing between adult and children’s lit
- Children’s heard same stories as their parents ex: Homer’s Iliad
- Oral culture- myth and stories circulate orally
Children’s Lit in the Middle Ages (476- 1400 CE)
- Widespread poverty and illiteracy
- social and political life dominated by Catholic Church
- Books: rare and expensive (Bible could take up to 3 years)
- Russell: As the classical world- oral tradition was the principle entertainment for most people
- Popular Stories: Arthurian Legend (England) El Cid (Spain) Beowulf (Scandinavia)
Children’s Lit in the Renaissance- Approx 1400
1450: Gutenberg moveable type
- Books are cheaper, easier to produce- emergence of a literary culture
- Mass production of books and mass education becomes possible
- Books of Courtesy
What is a “book of courtesy”?
- lessons in proper behaviour for young men
- become popular as a part of Renaissance humanism
- focus on secular and classical texts in addition to religious ideas
What did renaissance children actually read?
- The Renaissance was a period of hatred between Roman Catholics and Protestants-bloodshed
- Many children read John Foxe- Book of Martyrs- anti-Catholic work full of violent deaths
What does Orbis Sensualim Pictus mean? (John Comenius)
Translated as: ‘the World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures
What is generally considered to be the first picture book intended to educate young children?
- Orbis Sensualim Pictus-the World of Things Obvious to the Senses Drawn in Pictures (Comenius)
- Unusual-Published in Latin and German- contains 150 pictures representing activities like beer, killing animals and gardening
What does Orbis Sensualism Pictus demonstrate?
- children’s lit is and has always been an unusual genre- intentions that do not always line up with its effects
- How people read use adapt and recirculate children’s lit might not always fit comfortably with how we imagine the “purpose” of the genre
Children’s Lit in the 17th Century- Puritanism
During the rise of puritanism, there was an emphasis on reading (specifically the Bible) and education as a road to material success
Children’s Lit in the 17th Century- Chapbooks
A chapbook is a cheaply made books containing secular stories, often fairy tales) became popular but the Puritans disapproved
Children’s Lit in the 17th Century-New England Primer
1690- 19th C: alphabet taught using life death lessons with the Bible
Children’s Lit in the 17th Century- John Locke
1632-1704- English philosopher- wrote Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
-Tabula Rasa
What is “Thoughts Concerning Education”?
What it is about?
By John Locke
Main point: guard a young person by teaching about the world cautiously because childhood is a sight of constant imminent danger or threats- demonstrated anxieties around childhood
What does “Children as tabula rasa” mean?
Children as “blank slate”
-John Locke thought that children were white paper or wax to be moulded or fashioned as one pleases
Children’s Lit in the 18th and 19th C: The Romantic Child
- Children began to assume a unique status in society
- Children are seen as embodiments of the natural world
- legal and social changes for children for the first time (children under 7 can’t be hanged+ child labour laws)
- John Newberry
Who was John Newberry?
During the Romantic era- began publishing and promoting children’s books designed to entertain and not just preach
- Significant in that it was the first moment of sanctioned published lit aiming to please children
- Books sold with toy
- “A Little Pretty Pocket Book”
Children’s Lit in the 18th and 19th C: The Pious Dead Child
George Burder- Early Piety- didactic religious literature deploys the idea of the pious dead child
What are “divine songs”?
- moral lessons, manners and the use of animal metaphors
- Showed tremendous anxieties as a the new stage of childhood was defined
- Ex: “Against Idleness and Mischief”- Parodied in “How Doth the little crocodile” in Alice in Wonderland
Children’s Lit in the 18th and 19th C: The Child as the Colonizer
Examples include:
-Mary Sherwood- Little Henry and His Bearer:
The pious and dead child- conducting the work of colonialism
-Legh Richmond- Negro Servant:
Young people being deployed as tools of colonialism
-Ernest Thompson Seton- Two Little Savages:
Child serviced for education of the “savages”
Racist and problematic story
What best describes the child on the other end of the “Purple Jar” ?
- Middle class to lower class
- Female/male child
- Naive/innocent
- Early elementary age? Old enough to understand the lesson
- Persistent/ stubborn
According to “The Purple Jar”, what are the characteristics of “good” and “bad” children?
- Good: Listens to adults, thoughtful and prudent, thinks long-term effects over immediate satisfaction, resist temptation, practical not vain
- Bad: impulsive, stubborn, materialistic, uncritical, unobservant, greedy
What kind of adult does “The Purple Jar” imagine the child will become?
- Training the child to have common sense, become practical and unmaterialistic
- Will go on to teach children similar lessons
- Take responsibilities
- Frugal
What social/cultural desires and anxieties does “The Purple Jar” reflect?
- Managing impulsivity of children and their idleness (due to increased leisure time)
- Purple Jar- “idol worship”- puritanical influence, focus on the practical
- Industrial Revolution- mass production of consumer goods
- Preparing children for the temptations of consumer capitalism
- Class anxieties- if Rosamund is seen with dirty shoes- disgrace to family
Characteristics of a Folk Tale
- Fairytales circulated orally
- Adult and children audience
- Folk=Common people of a nation
- Hallet: common people were mostly illiterate
- Therefore folk tales were passed down through generations by word of mouth
What is the “broken telephone”?
Like a game of broken telephone, these oral tales were adapted and recorded to suit and reflect individual, cultural and national tastes, desires, anxieties
Hallett and Karasek: Fairytales must be seen as a _________
Hallett and Karasek: Fairy tale must be seen as a continuum
How do versions of folktales relate?
Folktales are prone to being told so differently that folklorists identify them as not as individual stories but as TYPES- similar plots that can be told in different ways
Who developed a classification system for folktales in 1910? AKA?
Anti Arne: developed classification for folktakes in 1910
Revised by Stith Thompson in 1928
Later revised and expanded by Uther in 2004
Originally the Aarne Thompson Tale Type Index and Motif Index became the Aarne Thompson Uther classification system (ATU number) and includes international folktales
How does the ATU system work?
The ATU system groups closely related folktales with a type
Ex: Supernatural Helpers ATU 500-550
Subtypes are indicated with letters:
Ex: Cinderella (510A) is a subtype of 510- the persecuted heroine who receives magical assistance
Also classifies motifs
Ex: Unnatural Cruelty
Significance of Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Propp was a Russian folklorist and scholar
- He analyzed the structure and patterns that he argued remained INVARIABLE beneath the changing surface details of folk tales
- Propp: folktales consist of actions, not descriptions and there is no introspection or reflection on events- (if a protagonist fails, they just try something else)
- Character, time and setting are all relatively simple
31 Narratemes
- Concept of Propp
- Narrateme is like an element, few stories contain all of these elements but where they do contain elements they happen in a certain order
What are the problems of Propp’s argument?
- Flattens oral variations into one schema
- Fails to account for the complexity of and variances in tone, mood, character
- Ex: didactic, moral, critical, subversive, dark, ironic
Significance of Sigmund Freud
- Theorized fairy tales: fundamental to the structure of the unconscious
- Fairy tales are like dreams, expressions of wish fulfillment
- Uses the example of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as the unconscious desire to be naked in public
- Fairy tales are a narrative manifestation of an unconscious desire/wish
Significance of Carl Jung
-Jung agrees with Freud that fairy tales are an unconscious site of repressed desires and emotions but proposes a second deeper “collective unconscious”
What is the collective unconscious?
- Collective unconscious: underlies the “personal unconscious” structured by symbolic archetypes (ex: lake, jug container)
- fairy tales reveal spiritual truths (positive, not neurotic or destructive)
- Interpreting fairy tales as a source of wisdom and higher consciousness
Significance of Bruno Bettelheim
- Austrian american child not qualified psychologist who wrote The Uses of Enchantment: the meaning of importance of fairy tales
- Believed that the darkest and most violent stories is the most attuned to the inner life of the child
- Only fairy tales offer the right balance of hope and conflict
Significance of Anne Wilson
Magic?
Internal Conflict?
Repetition?
British medievalist and narratologist
- Believed that what distinguishes fairy tales is not that they contain magic but that their entire way of representing the world is magical
- There is no internal conflict because the entire narrative is a representation of the protagonist thought process
- Repetitive action sequences are a reflection of different mental and emotional possibilities
Significance of Hugh Crago, What is a Fairy Tale?
“In Propp’s basic structure, a set of functions arranged in invariable order makes up a “move”- a complete sequence of events that come to a “happy ending”
Characters performing functions can vary without change to structure ex: doesn’t matter whether Jack finds a giant or ogre at the top of the beanstalk
Hugh Crago: What is a “move”
Looking at the ideas of Propp- a set of functions arranged in invariable order makes up a MOVE
A move is a complete sequence of events come to a “happy ending”
Hugh Crago: Characters performing functions can ____ without change to _____
Characters performing functions can VARY without change to STRUCTURE ex: doesn’t matter whether Jack finds a giant or ogre at the top of the beanstalk
